Staff photo 1964

DAVID LYNAGH

came to teach in Zambia because of two factors : my very recent marriage in August 1962 and the poor teachers ’ salaries in Northern Ireland at that time . Northern Rhodesia , later to become Zambia , offered my wife and me passage there , a much better pensionable salary and a furnished house . After an interview in Dublin , I was offered a teaching position at Kitwe , a copper mining town in the northwest part of the country . The school was Kitwe Boys ’ High School .

The little I knew of the country at that time came via a teacher friend who was on holiday from Broken Hill ( later to be renamed Kabwe ), another mining town there . I learned that if I was offered and took a position , I would be going to the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland as a federal educational officer — but that all changed within the year of our arrival when the Federation was dissolved . Northern Rhodesia became Zambia , Nyasaland became Malawi and Southern Rhodesia , under Prime Minister Ian Smith ,

declared itself unilaterally independent until the country was forced to allow native Africans to govern the newly named Zimbabwe .

I learned that the Federation lay within the tropics and that we would be living at around five thousand feet above sea level on the great African plateau where we would find the climate to be quite a challenge .

Getting to the school in Kitwe was an adventure in itself . We sailed out of Southampton to Cape Town on a frigid January 2 , 1963 , on the passenger ship , The Pendennis Castle , a ship of the Union Castle line . We were two weeks at sea with one port of call at Las Palmas en route . From Cape Town , we took a train north through western South Africa , Botswana , Southern Rhodesia , across the Zambezi River at Victoria Falls and into Northern Rhodesia . One of many sights I recall from the train was a rail yard with numerous cylinders lying by the track . One had MT

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